On July 5, 1938, Gisela von Poellnitz is released after nearly five months in Gestapo custody. She’s emaciated, her skin as white as paper, but she’s kept mum about the real purpose of her trip to Paris or Harro’s information about the German intervention in the Spanish Civil War. But something has happened in prison that everyone feared and suspected might occur: Already weak in the lungs, she has contracted tuberculosis, a life-threatening infection.
From now on the young adventurer can no longer live in the boathouse with Ricci von Raffay, can no longer cruise with him on his Harley, can no longer go to wild parties or on adventurous solo voyages; instead she needs constant medical care. Dr. Elfriede Paul, the girlfriend of Walter Küchenmeister, secures her a spot first in a respiratory sanitarium in Brandenburg and later one in Switzerland, but Gisela is in bad shape from the start. She becomes increasingly thin and diaphanous, regardless of how many care packages of food her friends send her—regardless of how often Libs visits her, always shaken by her cousin’s appearance, lying pale and Madonna-like in the pillows.
Libertas is also not doing well this summer. Gisela’s life-threatening condition upsets her, and now there are also problems in her affair with Weisenborn. Torn between the two men in her life, she suffers from pain in her abdomen and worries she’s pregnant; additionally she has a circulatory disorder and even passes out at one point.
In order to recuperate, to distance herself from everyone, and to gain clarity, she travels at the end of July 1938 to Bavaria and into Switzerland, a place she’s loved since attending school in Zurich from 1928 to 1932. In the Swiss metropolis she meets Ignazio Silone, an Italian émigré author and former Italian communist and anti-fascist—and an acquaintance of Harro’s. Silone is well connected, including to Thomas Mann, who lives in exile in Küsnacht on the shores of Lake Zurich.
Upon learning of Silone’s connection to the famous writer, Libs comes up with a plan to tell Thomas Mann about her husband. She’s worried about Harro, who—unbeknownst to her—at that same time has been added to the A-Kartei, the blacklist initiated by the much-feared leader of the Reich Main Security Office, Reinhard Heydrich. The list compiles names of those suspected to oppose the regime based on their previous activities, all of whom are to be “immediately arrested” in any political crisis and detained at concentration camps—in Harro’s case, in Sachsenhausen.
“She was scared that something could happen to Harro, and hoped that in such a case the public will be informed about him and his moral rectitude,” Silone writes about Libertas’s visit. He promises to introduce her to Thomas Mann, despite the fact that the writer’s busy because he’s in the process of giving up his residence in Switzerland and preparing to move his family.
Before long, Libs gets her chance. In the middle of August, the Mann family wants to drive into the high mountains of the Engadin one last time to stay at the famous Waldhaus-Hotel in Sils-Maria and bid goodbye to Europe; after that they’re off to the United States, to Princeton. For now, though, the Magic Mountain author is still in Zurich, and on August 6, 1938, he visits the publisher Emil Oprecht, accompanied by his son Golo. Silone is also invited and turns up with Libertas. “Ate and drank, chatty—then thunderstorm,” writes Thomas Mann in his diary of the soiree. Libertas is introduced to him and talks about Harro and his activities. It isn’t clear from the sources whether more contact followed from this initial meeting. But a Gestapo memo from 1942 claiming Harro Schulze-Boysen undertook “overtures to Thomas Mann” suggests it did.
Libertas returns by train to Berlin, where soon overtures of a totally different sort are made. Harro’s brother, Hartmut, now sixteen years old, visits Waitzstrasse. It’s not clear who comes up with the idea, but there is evidence that Libertas introduces Hartmut to sex and that Harro is aware of it, and may even have encouraged it. He has certainly been open with his family about his love life before, but never like this. Are he and Libs thumbing their nose at the Nazis, with their increasingly restrictive notions of propriety and family values? Or is Libertas following her passions and Harro struggling to keep pace?
Whether the parting of ways is linked to this initiation rite or not, Libertas’s affair with Günther Weisenborn draws to a close. Already she had sent him a pained letter from afar while in Switzerland. But they still meet and work on the Robert Koch play together. There are talks about possibly mounting the piece in the capital: “The Staatstheater Berlin has an option, but Gründgens isn’t sure just yet,” Libertas writes to her mother-in-law, Marie Luise. “He needs to ask Göring, as with all problematic things. But I think something will come of it.” Together with Weisenborn, she travels to Bremen to prepare for the premiere there. They stay in a hotel on September, 26, 1938, where they hear on the radio Hitler giving his speech announcing the annexation of the so-called Sudetenland, a large area of Czechoslovakia inhabited by a mix of Germans and Czechs: “It’s the last territorial claim I have to make in Europe,” the voice clangs on the radio. “But it is a claim I will not relinquish and which, God willing, I shall fulfill.”
For Harro, this political development means overtime at the Air Ministry. Even if he is not actively engaged in supporting Hitler’s aggressive behavior, the territorial claims to Czechoslovakia require every man to be at his desk: The proposed annexation develops into an international crisis that threatens to lead to armed conflict. In the army’s high command, some generals are convinced that a war at this particular moment would mean the demise of Germany. As a result, a plan for a putsch against Hitler is finalized, the implementation of which is imminent.
But then a foreign head of state gets in the way of the anti-Hitler Wehrmacht generals: Neville Chamberlain. In order to preserve peace at any price, the British prime minister visits Germany several times in quick succession, coming to the Rhine, then to Hitler’s Alpine hideaway at Berghof, and finally to the Munich conference, where the fate of Czechoslovakia, whose president isn’t invited, is sealed. Hitler emerges as the great victor of the affair. The Wehrmacht marches into the Sudetenland without resistance. The generals who’d been preparing the putsch call it off.
Even if he isn’t privy to these developments among the military command, Harro, from his desk, can still see the “materiel and psychological ‘machinery’ of world politics” as if through a microscope, as he writes to his father. As far as he’s concerned, British interest in the destruction of the Soviet Union is obvious and as a result the German Reich will be given a free hand in the east. This corresponds to Hitler’s polemic comment that Czechoslovakia is a Bolshevik aircraft carrier in the middle of Europe. A statement like this certainly has its desired effect in London.
The days are exciting that fall of 1938—only the nights are lonely. Sometimes, at the end of the workday, when Harro walks toward Waitzstrasse along Ku’damm, with its lavish neon lights, and rounds the final turn, the empty apartment stares at him like an abandoned film set. Sometimes there’s a note at the door where Libertas has written that it’ll be a late one. The affair with Weisenborn is apparently not over after all.
On the evening of September 30, Harro goes for a beer with Günther to clear the air for good. The next day Weisenborn writes in his diary: “Not seeing her. Don’t want to anymore.”
It’s a private victory for Harro—but he doesn’t lose sight of the geopolitical situation: “Peace has now suddenly ‘broken out,’ as I quite distinctly realized on Wednesday evening when the news first arrived,” he writes to his father on October 1, 1938, continuing with prophetic foreboding:
Whether it breaks out permanently in Europe, as Herr Chamberlain believes, will dictate how posterity judges these days. If, however, we are once again on the verge of war in one or two years, then there will be ten times as many victims as there would have been if things had come to a head now . . . and then history’s verdict will be severe. Let’s hope for the best.
In October, to address the Czechoslovakian crisis, which for Harro brought world conflicts into sharp focus, he and Walter Küchenmeister write their first illegal pamphlet: Der Stosstrupp, or The Raiding Party. In it, the annexation of the Sudetenland is depicted as the precursor to a violent human catastrophe.
To produce the leaflet, Kurt Schumacher acquires the necessary paper from a wholesaler. As an artist he can do so without attracting attention. As for the postage stamps, the sculptor buys batches of them here and there, never in suspiciously large amounts. Kurt’s wife, Elisabeth, undertakes the task of making fifty copies of the pamphlet. Using the telephone book, Libertas tracks down addresses of people she regards as intelligent: teachers, doctors, lawyers, and others who might effectively spread opinions. Anyone typing addresses onto the envelopes, stuffing them, and affixing the stamps wears cotton gloves.
Then Dr. Elfriede Paul sets off in her car, a Ford. As a doctor, she can always justify any trip in case she is stopped. Even wearing ladies’ gloves while tossing the letters in the mailbox won’t raise suspicion given the cool October weather. She mails only a couple of envelopes per postbox, then she drives on. It’s the first coordinated action taken by the circle of friends, and successful, as everything goes off without a hitch: a test run—and proof that they can count on each other.